[Wikipedia-l] multilingual wikipedia

[Andre Engels]

Ah yes, if what you meant to say is that this system is better, I
definitely agree with you. It's an idea that has been floating around
more. Only problem is the amount of coding it would take, and that one
would need to get information from more than one database to show a
single page.

Andre Engels

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 17:48:22 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 20:11:36 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > As a bot writer and operator, I can say that bots _could_ help in
> > finding this kind of cases. We might go work more on it (the bot
> > notices it if it can get to two pages on the same language - in this
> > case "Germanic languages" and "German language"). There's quite a
> > number of such problems; a common cause is that when a page turns into
> > a disambiguation page on some Wikipedia, the interwiki links to it are
> > usually not changed.
> 
> I see your point that bots can help; my point was that they can't do
> so automatically.  A bot would have to inform a human that both
> 'Germanic language' and 'German language' were encountered, and the
> human would have to take action based on this.
> 
> What I suggest is to have a language-independent 'linker' page
> maintained in a separate namespace.  (Maybe 'meta' or something new,
> e.g. 'interwiki').  All it would consist of is a list of interwiki
> links, with the meaning that any page named on the linker page was to
> be taken to be an equivalent for any other named page.
> 
> Under this new scheme, suppose I'm reading the English wikipedia
> article on 'Germanic languages''.  If I then notice a link to
> [[da:Tysk sprog]] and fix it, I will be editing this linker page.  If
> the previous error had been propogated into other wikipedias, they
> will have their link corrected immediately, without having to wait for
> a bot or human to spot the bad link and fix it.
> 
> Some more advantages:
> 
> 1) Since interwiki changes would then be changes to the linker page,
> they would not add volume to the changelist history of linked pages.
> 
> 2) There would be fewer anonymous edits to wikipedias.  Right now, if
> I want to add an interwiki link to a language I don't speak, I won't
> bother creating an account, because I wouldn't particularly benefit
> from having one.  In this proposed system, I would merely need to have
> an account on 'meta' or 'interwiki'.
> 
> 3) The bloat factor of interwiki links on pages would be reduced.
> 
> 4) The problems with broken interwiki links caused by a wikipedia
> munging foreign characters entered as literals in the input would be
> more easily fixed.  I've seen a few interwiki links to Cyrillic
> wikipedias appear as, for example, [[bg:????????]], probably because
> someone tried to copy-paste a literal character from one page to
> another, and their system didn't support the character set.
> 
> Hmm, that was a bit longer than I intended. :)  Again, please feel
> free to give me feedback on the above idea, or redirect me to the
> appropriate forum to post it if this isn't it.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Steve
>